Back! I'm back and in less than a few months!!!
All right, so what have I learned and how? Well, a lot, so I won't go over all of it right now, but I need to at least begin. I wish this was as professional and well-organized as some of my other advice posts, but I know it won't be. Instead, I'll probably just rant.
Okay, so how did I learn things? Well, I've been podcasting and doing a weekly fan-fic recording for somewhere near four or five months now. Normally, you'd think 'that's not that much,' but at the time of writing this I have 62 videos on YouTube. 62. In five months. Let's not forget that I've done other things for IoA and random internet people in that time, too.
Every single week, I do something new to try and improve on my voice.
While driving to work lately, I've also been trying to improve on my singing voice. I do this almost every day now. I have a pretty horrible singing voice and have trouble staying on-key. As such, I've made a lot of improvements in a short time.
I guess the first thing I'll start with is the biggest thing: Range.
There's a lot you can to increase your range and the more of these things you do, the better it gets. I'm a fan of singing, accents, and funny voices. Sometimes, I do all three at once. I'm reminded of a drive home one night when I broke into Vegeta, Nappa, Hiei, Krillan, and a couple other voices. During the song, I switched almost every single line between these voices. I didn't worry too much about singing on-key, more about keeping the voices solid and distinct while still making sure I was in fact singing. I've also found that I sound pretty awesome when I'm singing in a Scottish accent.
This brings up another thought: Whenever I mention accents, I'll say that I've had a lot of methodology training and it's taken years to get where I am. First you learn stage accents (which is what I usually do because they're easier to identify and a slip-up here or there is rarely noticed), then you learn what the real accents sound like and how to mark-up a script to phonetically pronounce them right. Finally, you learn how to get comfortable in the accent and tone it down so it sounds like you're naturally speaking that way instead of going in and out of your own voice. The third stage requires you to know Stage 2 so you can mark a script and then you have to learn what it really sounds like from actual people. Again, the IDEA site and YouTube are your friends for this.
Anyhow, back to range!
Range has a lot of qualities to it. There's pitch, timbre, octaves, regional variations, speech impediments, tonal variance, and probably more I'm not thinking of.
What am I talking about here?
Well let's try to describe a few:
[I apologize for raping the English language with the way the examples are laid out]
Emily Hanes from Metric: High pitched, lots of falsettos, almost no timbre, some octave range, under the singing there's a slight Canadian accent, no noticable speech impediments, and because it's Canadian there will be different tonal inflections than there would be for someone in Texas.
Vegeta: lots of gravel and timbre, variances due to personality i.e. short fuse and anger, pitch is actually mid-range but appears lower due to the gravel and timbre, very little tonal variance because anger makes for passion and passion means you're more interested in forcing out the message than making a subtly manipulative argument, no real speech issues but they can be added to indicate a vein popping in his head or something, standard Midwestern 'non-accent' that announcers prize.
Just in those two voices, there's a plethora of things to learn. These are the kinds of distinctions my show has taught me to make because I've been voicing every. Single. Character. In my show. Thanks to that and my drive to keep from being bored, I try new things all the time and do my durndest to give every character a unique voice. I've gotten really comfortable slipping into some. As such, it's become really easy to create new voices on the fly. The beginning was rough, though.
What about getting comfortable in character then? Well, this is one of those things that D&D has helped with a lot. When you have a distinct interest in your character and what happens to your character, you begin caring about them. When you care about them, you want things for them. When that happens, they're more than just a stat sheet. Basically, the best way to get in-character is to form a relationship with the character. Who are they? What do you get out of being them? Once you've done that, you just need to spend time actually being them.
There are a lot of ways to do this and, luckily, it's also going to increase your range. I remember a lot of blog posts and interviews with Trey Parker and Chris Sabbat. Increasing your range will do a lot for your acting / voicing ability, but there are certain things that you can never build up to and it will destroy your vocal cords. The original voices for Eric Cartman and Vegeta are good examples. There's a distinct change in Vegeta after the first season or two (and I know the original had two separate voice actors, I'm talking about after they re-did it) and again when Sabbat is voicing him in DBZ Kai. Similarly, Trey Parker couldn't keep doing Cartman's original voice because it was too grating and he repeatedly hurt his vocal cords. So, the moral of this interruption is there's some characters you will NEVER get comfortable with and if you're hurting yourself, you may want to reconsider the voice.
Now, that being said, here's the way to improve your range AND get comfortable. Sing. Seriously, anything that makes you look and feel ridiculous will make doing normal lines a synch. It won't help with the acting, but I'll try to revisit that sometime soon. How can you be comfortable experimenting and trying new things if you don't do ridiculous things? My friends will tell you I've gotten bored and used an Australian accent for hours at a time while we go out. I've had conversations between me, myself, and I in different voices.
Getting comfortable is a difficult thing and just takes practice. The more in-character you are, the more comfortable with the character you are, the better the performance you can give as that character.
So... yeah. Stuff. I'm back! Hopefully more often since I'm sure I can think of a couple more post topics thanks to the show.
Dat post.
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